Why Do You Watch a Show?

I’m definitely enjoying Star Trek: Discovery so far. The production values of course are fabulous, and the performances are fine. Having already seen Sonequa Martin-Green in The Walking Dead I knew she would be awesome, and she so is.

I’m reminded of something a guy said to me at Sutekh, at the University of Sydney. This was in the days when The Next Generation was still airing. He said that TNG was not good, because the way that they solved problems on the show was a Deus ex machina each week. I asked him how many of the episodes he’d seen and he said, all of them. I said that that was strange, because the show had already been running for two years by then. I asked why he would have seen all the episodes if he did not think it was a good show and he said, “Because it’s Star Trek!”

I knew what he meant. It was easy to find fault with just about any episode you could think of, but you just kept on watching it because of this experience that you got from it. The Star Trek Experience is a real phenomenon.

I mean, Star Trek creates an interesting world. It also usually tries to be about something that you can chew on in your own time. I had already been thoroughly stimulated by two episodes I had seen, “Symbiosis” and “The Measure of a Man”. I agreed more with something that another guy at Sutekh said. You didn’t watch the show because it had exciting drama – it was often quite boringly civilised – you watched it for the issues it raised. Yep, as a philosophy student I could watch an episode like “The Measure of a Man” because it was basically philosophical argument and that was fine with me.

Discovery, like so many Golden Age shows, has a seasonal arc. I am quite happy to give it time to tell its story. I also note that it has already introduced a nice theme about not exploiting life forms (i.e. the tardigrade) for the sake of a technological advancement. Of course the idea of the spore drive is preposterous, but so what? Doctor Who, for example, is a series with much kudos, but if you watched it for a science lesson you’d have rocks in your head. I care more about the fact that that episode introduced me to the tardigrade in real life in the first place. It’s really cool to think that an organism like that is sure to outlive us. I grew up with the trope that cockroaches were the life forms most likely to survive a nuclear holocaust, but this is so much truer of the tardigrade.

The reality is that most science fiction is fantasy without the magic. Most science fiction relies on vast improbabilities at least occasionally just for the exciting stories they allow. The Expanse has wonderful world-building involving hard science fiction. But its central plot device, the protomolecule, is so much applied phlebotinum. It’s fascinating too to see all the science involved in The Martian. But the entire premise of the story rests upon a scientific impossibility in the forceful dust storm on Mars. For whatever reasons people watch science fiction, scientific plausibility is generally not one of them. For example, Doctor Who is the least scientifically plausible science fiction series on television, and it is by far the longest-running. I think I must agree with Brian Aldiss: "science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts".